Forum / Congratulations Britain

Samuel Derrick Rosen
Jun 24, 04:40pm

on this historic day, a real blow finally against the evils of Cultural Marxism the sociopathic oligarchy. Perhaps soon poets/writers will be published for the quality of the work and not for what it says?

Iain James Robb
Jun 24, 05:13pm

What Samuel says is true. Britain struck a very real blow last night in defiance not only against corporate global fascisn, but against a Frankfurt School and Fabian Society based dystopian agenda designed specifically to decimate Western culture and the values of democracy. For the last few decades, poetry in Britain has been unilaterally in the hands of a middle class cabal of social programmers pushing the Marxist philistine agenda of tub-thumping Far Left postmodernism. Almost every single person who has been printed has been either a Radical Feminist, someone not even born within the country but who has been printed purely to suit quota pandering, or some related anti white Western bourgeouis class shill at cwar against every aesthetic standard of Western poetic culture. Performance poetry has proliferated like cancer. It has replaced study of the greats in high schools, universities and colleges. Almost none of the people printed have any talent. They are mere overprivileged Leftist class nepotism, or racial or gender nepotism, affirmative action beneficiaries. The publishers which have promoted them are only propped up by involuntary public funding, which has recirculated back to them with mandates on how to use it by - you guessed it - the Collectivist, anti Westernist EU. No small presses who follow meritocracy get promoted in the Left run arts press, which is also propped up by State funding because funding is required as a badge of Leftist interest in order to get sponsored, and they have therefore repeatedly gone down the tubes. The only way out of this mess, exacerbated by social programming corporations like the BBC in what passes for their own political class prejudiced arts coverage, is to remove arts funding altogether, except from voluntary donors and for heritage concerns. That only now is possible in a socio-economic system where, even if arts funding still exists in a limited capacity, it only serves the interests of non politicised aesthetic quality, for the purposes of finding actual readers to recoup investment and serve cultural export terms. The corrupt and shamelessly nepotistic poetry establishment which for decades has stank to high heaven like the rotten corpse of a beached leviathan has met its inevitable downfall at the hands of libertarian democracy.

Chris Okum
Jun 24, 06:03pm

This has been a very interesting year so far. They might write a book about this one. As a Los Angeles-born Anglophile I find all of this fascinating. I don't begrudge Britain for what they have done. It seems to me that Western Civ. is getting reading to flip the sign from Open to Closed.

Iain James Robb
Jun 24, 06:14pm

We have rescued civilisation. The younger generation may hate us now for it, but they were hellbent on destroying centuries of cultural and democratic process. They will either grow up and realise that we did the right thing, or their children will, because they'll no longer be indoctrinated by Frankfurt Schoolers in public education. Holland wants to leave, Hungary, France, Italy and Belgium. Radical Islamism is setting up camp against the citizen rights and personal saftey of everyone in Europe. People are getting arrested for opposing it non-violently, but rape, mugging, race-based hate crime and terrorist atrocities are everywhere, and it's the Europeans on the reciving end of it, and the authorities don't even care. Free speech is being demolished everywhere. Schools, colleges and universities are little more than indoctrination factories, the media has for years in Europe been a censored form of superstatist propaganda. Something has to give. I'm glad we bit the bullet first.

Samuel Derrick Rosen
Jun 24, 07:41pm

Sturgeon wanting another referendum on Scottish independence so we can then rejoin the EU is a contradiction in term, I hope the Scottish people see through the smokescreen.

I hope other countries follow suit and the EU is demolished.

The Remainers were going on and on about how the EU is a beacon of peace and stabilizes Europe but neglect to mention that the first world wars were funded by the banking elites so they could then form the EU and as a select few rule over us all. Brexit is a blow against a one world tyranny.

Chris Okum
Jun 24, 08:59pm

Sam or Ian: Can you explain to me why people are acting as if what Britain did was tantamount to suicide? I honestly don't understand. What am I not getting? Why are people acting as if Britain is done and over with?

Samuel Derrick Rosen
Jun 24, 09:08pm

It's just fear-mongering and brainwashing. I'll let Iain elaborate as he is more clued-up.

Samuel Derrick Rosen
Jun 24, 09:52pm

This is a good summing up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYqzcqDtL3k

David Ackley
Jun 25, 02:02pm

What bollocks( to borrow a term, Iain and Samuel.)The EU has proved little more than a convenient whipping-boy for holders of nationalist sentiment, old-school chauvinist jokers like the vile Boris Johnson, e.g. In actuality it's a purely financial arrangement, and a pretty shaky one at that. Still, it might have been a step in the right direction from the hellhole that was Europe in the 20th century, but pseudo nationalists yearning for the glory days of English imperialism and the unlovely classist system that still prevails couldn't stand having to live in the world rather than hide on their little island and pull it on over their heads. Bye-bye, Scotland (where cooler and smarter heads will no doubt prevail in separating and rejoining the EU). Bye-bye, in all probability, Northern Ireland. By-bye, maybe, Wales. Bye-by, the so-called U.K. Forever England, all by itself alone. P.S. don't take this personally, lads, it's just an opinion.

David Ackley
Jun 25, 03:36pm

By the way, Samuel, your line beginning " The first world wars were funded by banking elites..." etc, shouldn't, in terms of factual accuracy go unchallenged, since it is an expression of rank and fictional conspiracy theory that any number of historians of WWI (e.g. Barbara Tuchman, et al) have long since cast into the dustbin. World Wars I and II were nothing if not the bloody and murderous extension of exactly the sorts of nationalist-expansionist and racial aspirations that such theories covertly espouse.

Mathew Paust
Jun 26, 06:24pm

"...The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand..."

Chris Okum
Jun 26, 09:51pm

We live in very interesting times. For the last 25 years the theme of connection - that we live in a complex network in which everyone affects everyone else - has been pushed and advertised to an excessive amount. This is ideology and it is an ideology that is starting to be rejected. This is THE grand narrative of the post cold war era. Its possible collapse is indicative of something else, which will affect artists more than most, at least at first: post-modernism may have run its course. On to the next, whatever the next is. But it may already be in our midst. We just don't recognize it. Because it seems and feels chaotic.

Samuel Derrick Rosen
Jun 26, 10:24pm

I agree.

I am hoping that through Britain's departure from the EU those that abuse the arts in order to push political agendas (and political correctness) will no longer be funded, that instead, artists will receive recognition by merit rather than by their political beliefs or their gender.

Chris Okum
Jun 26, 10:54pm

I don't things are going back to the way they were, Sam. I think everything is swerving, but not reversing.

Samuel Derrick Rosen
Jun 26, 11:09pm

You're not hopeful then?

Samuel Derrick Rosen
Jun 26, 11:10pm

I'm hoping for a different kind of way we were.

Chris Okum
Jun 26, 11:21pm

I'm neither hopeful nor unhopeful. All I can do is watch and try to make a modicum of sense out of how the world we live in changes as aI get older, because it is going to change whether I want it to or not, and in ways I don't particularly care for. But I don't pretend to know what is going to happen. I am only guessing. That's all anyone is doing, although are those who would have you believe that they have the answers. I don't people who say they have the answer. There is no answer on how to go forward. It's all a blind curve taken at maximum speed. This may explain my partial aversion to Science Fiction. I don't like prophecy or prophets. They never seem to get it right. Some come pretty close, like PKD and Ballard; they were able to see enough of what was around the bend, but not the whole thing, and these were writers who were tuned in better than most. All I can feel right now is that we are at some kind of - possibly terminal - impasse. You know that scene in Willy Wonka, when they take the boat through the tunnel, and things get kind of freaky and weird? That seems about right to me.

Samuel Derrick Rosen
Jun 27, 12:02am

Great post Chris.

Part of the nightmare for me is that I see a large group of talented writers (both male and female) here on Fictionaut but when I go out into the world, to poetry nights, when I read the magazines and what gets printed, it saddens me and frustrates me. But that's just one aspect of what's going on, it is hard to make sense of, my friends feel the exact same way, like we are living in some kind of matrix and that perhaps we have to go through these dearths of creativity, these long periods of inertia, these phases of tyranny, in order to evolve, that it is all fluctuation, a cosmic seesaw.

I suppose that is good in a way, it gives us something to write about.

Samuel Derrick Rosen
Jun 27, 12:05am

I really hope that some kind of age of individualism is looming on the horizon, but I think it is going to get worse before it gets better, it might take a couple of hundred years.

Mathew Paust
Jun 27, 04:40pm

Interesting discussion. I agree with the idea the future seems up for grabs. What worries me is who's doing the grabbing. The idea of merit also bothers me in that merit in the arts seems historically to be something that comes about in the present by force of personality, and by other judgments at the longer range--maybe that's when the academics rule. The dynamics are what interest me. The older I get the more cautious my judgment.

strannikov
Jun 28, 11:29pm

Even when I indulge in writing dopey little science satires set in futures near or far, I never suspend my utter disbelief in the future.

I am one of those who actually subscribes to the "growing block universe" hypothesis of time: the past is a record of baryonic existence, the present is the latest instant thereof, but the future itself has no baryonic existence whatsoever. The future does not exist, and it has never existed. (Close readers of "The Fermi Panic" see my contention displayed that the Fermi Paradox holds against both alien civilizations just waiting to become our benefactors as against all notions that our posterity is desperately attempting to perfect time travel technology so that they can visit us to set us straight before it's too late for someone.)

I am thus reluctant to accord any predictive value to last week's momentous Brexit vote. After reading some five days' worth of commentary and explanation, I still can't quite understand all of its implications, since I'm an American provincial and no close close observer of English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish affairs. Nevertheless, I do hold some sympathies with the positions enunciated by Samuel Derrick Rosen and Iain James Robb in this thread, and while steering clear of overt political views, perhaps possibly maybe I can begin to express some terms of my agreement.

As Mathew noted just above: the game would now seem to be on, and fairly unambiguously: post-modernism as advertised for decades now as "our literary age" has been dead apparently for some time, only now the odor wafts pungently into all working noses. What literary age now commences it is now our task(s) to establish. (I suspect many have been dreading this moment.)

I think I've been diplomatically delicate overall in my critical exhalations since accepting the invitation in December 2011 to appear at Fictionaut. My most strident and more deeply felt piece came c. September 2014, just after I attended a university writers' conference (which had been banner-advertised on the very pages of Fictionaut).

In the piece that emerged, "Barbarian(s) Within the Gates", I expressed my distress over "the academic captivity of American letters" that I had just witnessed at the Prestigious University's conference. I decried what I saw as the pernicious influence of the MFA credentialing industry. I bemoaned the death of most appreciation for literary humor that I saw displayed at this conference. I bewailed the absence I perceived of critical latitude, even among the majority consisting of credentialed academics. I deplored the apotheosis of High Seriousness and almost choked on it, it was so cloying in that local atmosphere. I was incensed that NO ONE present ever once mentioned "flash fiction" until or unless I provoked him or her to comment. In short, I came away not persuaded that American letters had wound up in caring hands.

My views, and those expressed by Robb and Rosen in this thread, might cause some to wince, if they feel themselves the beneficiaries of academic affiliation or MFA credentials: I do not speak for Messers Robb and Rosen, but I myself intend to slight no one but to ask whether anyone really thinks that academic affiliation or MFA credentials have delivered a superior or even a compelling literature in an age when literature seems to've lost most of its readership. (I do begin to see all cultural engagement as a zero-sum game, since the hours and days and years devoted to music or to film, to sports or to cable fare or to gaming, e. g., are hours and hours no one is devoting to the reading of fiction and poetry. I am a bibliophile even without being a writer.)

The Brexit vote has left many with the disquieting suspicion of disjunctions at work in societies across the globe of today. Again, I contend this is no extension of post-modernism: the Brexit vote, as Robb points out succinctly, suggests that THAT period is now over, and likely has been over for some years now, only the break has been made visible with this momentous vote. Institutional supervision and leadership and endorsement need no longer be seen as reliable or trustworthy.

If we writers alive today have responsibilities--to ourselves, to our readers, to our craft--we now begin to instantiate this new era when the comfortable or the safe are no longer . . . not fashionable, but no longer CREDIBLE. The assertion of values without benefit of academic endorsement and institutional preference is upon us all now, equally. (To my untutored mind this seems reminiscent of the repudiation of Academies that afflicted French art and literature in the second half of the 19th century, seems to reflect the American experience of 19th century literature, when a Poe and a Twain were among the most able "unlettered" practitioners.)

Myself, I remain aloof from all plagues (except for those I concoct), and if left to my devices I would suggest critical re-engagement with classical modes and models that surely endure because I am convinced we have not really outgrown the anthropology of the classical era. I do not argue that writing fictions set in classical periods merit any appeal, only that the models of poetic imagination of the classical period have not been outgrown as we have been led to believe by much of modernity, post-modernity, and contemporaneity (and yes, sadly, by mythical Progress itself).

Mathew Paust
Jun 29, 02:26pm

Should the above from the "untutored" mind of Strannikov indicate but one thing it's that Strannikov's mind don't need no steenkin tutors.

Marcus Speh
Jul 02, 02:49pm

I live in Europe but there isn't much more open discussion about Brexit here than in the U.S., I should think. Supporters of Brexit though in the majority, are vilified. Journalists argue that it wasn't a real majority though because people didn't know what they were doing. The EU evidently believes it can bully any other nation who wishes to defect. Germans, themselves no strangers to the concept of bullying, are publicly outraged though, I suspect, privately envious of the British chuzpe. My respect for England has grown enormously despite the beating that they received recently at the hands of Iceland: since Iceland also snubbed the EU, the game probably has to count as a form of viking initiation). Defending what's left of democracy won't be a walk in Regent's Park (a famously flat, uneventful scenery in London). Entering old age proper may still be a decade away for my wife and me but we're willingly going to hand over our voting rights to young people who know better what to do with the world.

About Strannikov, the iconic commenter of the end times: alas, I can never read his name without thinking of a Soviet commissar (http://www.imfdb.org/images/thumb/4/40/MW_Soviet_TT33_3.jpg/600px-MW_Soviet_TT33_3.jpg). Decades of cold war training left an indelible trace. His writing makes my brain hurt a little but my brain is getting old. Just as I, too, favor Robb and Rosen's views, I also mourn for the demise of the "classical tradition" in literature, alongside with the demise of other views, values and words worth conserving if only to enliven conversation. Like others, I'm split - modernity was so important to my grandparents and even to my parents: who'd have thought that the same shtick could be reforged into an executioner's sword? ("The revolution devours its children", Mallet du Pan observed). If Strannikov's diatribe causes pain, this is perhaps a transfer from the tortured soul of tradition.

Sam Rasnake
Jul 02, 03:30pm

In this age of cyber necessity, addictions, and existence ... individualism has become a breeze of pond beside a forest of yore. The I absorbed by We.

Samuel Derrick Rosen
Jul 02, 06:40pm

I'm living in the twilight zone on the edge of the outer limits

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/02/theresa-may-prime-minister-conservative-leadership-brexit-vote/

Chris Okum
Jul 03, 03:13am

Smells like gas in here.

strannikov
Jul 03, 07:54am

CO: Chemists assure us that helium is colorless, odorless, tasteless, non-toxic, and inert, while oxygen shares at least some of these properties.

Mathew Paust
Jul 03, 05:51pm

Sorry, Chris. It's the damned burritos again.

Smiley McGrouchpants, Jr-Esq-III
Jul 18, 06:17pm

So, Chris, if you want to know why people're considering this "tantamount to suicide" (and not just an axing of the Brit. equivalent of the NEA, funding "Poison" and "Piss Christ," or just plain ol' infighting at Editorialships as can happen in the best of times, privileging leftist strains of thought!), I'm gonna have to point you to an SF guy (he co-wrote "The Rapture of the Nerds" with Cory Doctorow), since (MEA CULPA!) he got so offended by a blithe "Britain sucks, anyway!" tweet I posted before I knew what Brexit was that I GOT BLOCKED! I'm such a sad, sorry sack of an asshole to be worth getting blocked by Charles Stross (though, I've since deleted the post) for blithely playing "not-serious absurd" about something I'd only just then even heard OF! Serves me right.

Well ... no hard feelings, here's the scoop from the Man Himself:

"Sterling has tanked to its lowest level in 31 years, the stock market has crashed by 10% already, and we're likely to see international repercussions as all the sovereign wealth funds that had invested in the London property market see 30% wiped off their investments in a matter of days. Longer term, this may well be the beginning of the end for the UK as a nation. (Watch who's standing on the sidelines praising the result: Donald Trump, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Marine le Pen -- a who's who of international fascismus.) The EU was the guarantor of the Good Friday peace agreement in Northern Ireland: the Northern Ireland peace process must thus be presumed to be broken, and it's anybody's guess what happens next."

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/13524601-tomorrow-belongs-to-me
--------------------------------------
P.S.: Did you know PKD wrote a sort-of sequel to "Dr. Strangelove" called "Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along after the Bomb"? Here, I'll prove it:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/636108.Dr_Bloodmoney?ac=1&from_search=true

eamon byrne
Jul 24, 10:28am

Strannikov, man that was a good post. Very thoughtful. As also the reply by Marcus. Let me say I'm no economist, but I rather feel that the Brexit thing has economic rather than cultural significance. Some leftist economists down my way have criticised the critics of Brexit, while I believe the "star" leftist economist, Thomas Picketty, took the opposite view, being a supporter of the UK staying within the Eurozone. So there you are! A divergence of opinion. Hey, what the fuck do I know? My own gut reaction is to say that Brexit is bad, but I admit that mine are probably irrelevent reasons: that the Brexiters were largely old white rich fogies yearning for the days of the old dart, and slightly younger middle-age racists. The trigger for Brexit according to this admittedly superficial analysis? The wave of refugees coming out of Syria. Or even closer to the truth: baaaaad Muslims! This is a manifestation of some deep seated fear of things different which we probably all feel to some degree. (ie: I'm no racist, BUT ..) Or closer to the surface a predictable reaction to the WAR ON TERROR (shock, horror!) rubbish that's been pushed by the CAPITALIST MACHINE using such tools as that nasty MURDOCH PRESS and TEH TRUMP. Anyway, back to the scribbling ...

Samuel Derrick Rosen
Jul 24, 11:51am

I think it is more those who are pro EU that are afraid of things.

Samuel Derrick Rosen
Jul 24, 11:56am

The leftists protesting against Brexit were wearing tshirts saying "we love the EU", these are the same people that are supposed to be anti-establishment and yet they are in support of the whole of Europe being under the control of a few nameless despots.

Samuel Derrick Rosen
Jul 24, 12:26pm

One thing I'll admit, I think people in support of Brexit were being a bit naive, I don't think it is going to result in what they were seeing in their minds, including myself.

I do think anyone who subscribes to a political belief (left or right or up and down or in the middle or any which way) is a victim of naivete.
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